Alberto Contador of Spain will once again be the man to beat in this year's Tour de France. Photograph: Jean-Pierre Belzit/AP

The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday 11 July 2010

Contrary to our interview with cycling star Alberto Contador (Sport) the Caisse D'Epargne cycling team is not domiciled in France. It is a Spanish-registered and domiciled team. Caisse D'Epargne is the French sponsor but the management company is Abarca Sports from Pamplona.

For the past two decades the Tour de France has belonged to the USA and Spain. The Americans have followed their national stereotype to the letter: global stars such as Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong, both of whom managed the greatest comebacks in the sport's history and took salary levels to stratospheric heights, accompanied by, in Armstrong's case at least, whirlwinds of controversy – bigger arguments, juicier doping allegations, and meatier lawsuits.

The Spanish, on the other hand, have gone to the other extreme. If Armstrong is the equivalent of a jet fighter – very fast, cracking the sound barrier as he goes, shaking those around him out of their slumbers, and leaving an unmissable slipstream – the Spanish resemble those funny black triangular things made largely of carbon fibre that zip about under the radar. They are stealth cyclists, remaining largely unnoticed before and after the racing is done.

Miguel Indurain was the first Spanish stealth champion, dominating the Tour from 1991 to 1995, five Julys in which the most dramatic event was the annual ritual of watching him receive his birthday cake. As Indurain was about to win his first Tour, a Spanish journalist came up with the phrase that was to sum up Big Mig: so impenetrable was the great man, said the writer, that the woman in his life would never know the man she had married. Oscar Pereiro and Carlos "the silent assassin" Sastre, respectively 2006 and 2008 winners, were so obscure that no one even went to the trouble of dreaming up such a line about them.

This year, Spain's fourth stealth cycling champion, Alberto Contador, is expected to win his third Tour in four starts, if the form he has shown this year holds. Three Tour victories would be key, as that marks the point at which a Tour winner joins a small, elite club: one or two wins is the norm, but only eight riders in the race's history have managed three victories or more. Equally strong in the time trials and the mountains, Contador is the perfect all-rounder, and has won every major Tour he has entered since 2007, taking the Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a España in 2008, when he did not start in France. Only four other cyclists have won all three Grand Tours during their careers. It is a remarkable record for a rider still only 27.

Yet he has remained in the shadows, emerging to take the plaudits before returning to live the life of a normal man in Pinto, an anonymous dormitory town in the Madrid hinterland No tax exile in Monte Carlo for him. As far as indulgences go, Contador's are decidedly modest by sports star standards: a Porsche he bought after his Giro win, a BMW that was his personal reward after last year's defeat of Armstrong, a Weimar dog called "Tour" bought after his first win in the French race. Birds are one of his hobbies, but he has given up his aviary of 20 canaries.

"Off the bike he is a simple, humble guy, but on the bike … There are two different faces to Alberto: one in the saddle, the other in front of the press," said his directeur sportif, the Italian Giuseppe Martinelli, who ironically enough was Marco Pantani's manager in the 1990s. The same was said of Indurain, time after time. Other than his dramatic attacks in the mountains, Contador's one concession to the charisma-seekers is the victory salutethat usually follows those attacks: he mimes a shooting gesture like a child playing cowboys and Indians, which has led to him being nicknamed pistolero or gunslinger.

Spanish stealth cyclists are a recent trend, some would say a historical aberration. On two wheels, Spain was once known for producing charismatic, quixotic figures such as Federico Bahamontes, a child of the civil war famed for two episodes, one in which he was (wrongly) claimed to have left the field behind on a climb, then stopped at the top for an ice cream, another in which he set about an opponent with a pump. Luis Ocaña was a tormented champion of the 1970s, who regularly attempted to defeat Eddy Merckx only to implode dramatically en route. Perico Delgado was an equally unpredictable character who lost the 1989 Tour in unprecedented style by turning up late for the start of the prologue.

Perhaps this seachange helps explain why Spain is no longer a major cycling nation, if its representation in the Tour is any measure. There is one Spanish-registered team in the Tour, but it would be insulted at that description: Euskaltel is Basque, not Spanish. The Caisse d'Epargne squad is French-backed and domiciled, but largely Spanish-managed. And that is it. Ironically, Spain has the strongest stage racer in the world, but no team for him to ride in. As a result, Contador will line up in the colours of Astana, financed by the Kazakh national development fund Samruk Kazyna, with largely Italian management and inevitably known as Team Borat. Spanish sponsors, one suspects, hanker after the romantic days of Perico and company (also, perhaps, after a time when dope scandals were less common).

Contador began riding a handed-down bike from his elder brother Francisco at the age of 15. On their first ride together, on a little hill outside Pinto, he was faster than his brother, and that seems to have sparked his interest in cycling, after forays into athletics and football. From his earliest races he was given the nickname Pantani, after the iconic controversial Italian climber of the mid-1990s,because like Pantani he would always sprint for the King of the Mountains award in every event he rode. By the age of 20, he was a professional, under the tutelage of Manolo Saiz, the rotund Buddha-like figure who had a knack for discovering emerging stars until he was busted during the Operación Puerto blood doping scandal of 2006.

One reason why Contador has remained relatively unsung is because each of his Grand Tour wins has been overshadowed by other events. His 2007 Tour victory, riding for the Discovery team, was a relative anti-climax as the race tried to get its collective head around a series of drug scandals. His 2008 Giro and Vuelta wins were emphatic – the more so as he rode the Giro at a week's notice – but what mattered more was the fact that his team, Astana, were refused entry to the Tour due to involvement in the 2007 drug scandals (in which Contador had not been implicated). No Tour winner had ever had to suffer such humiliation.

2009, of course, was the year of the reprise of cycling's greatest comeback, with Armstrong in the starring role. Contador may have won, but the main strand in the plot was his relations with the Texan, who was then also riding for Astana and employed every psychological trick up his sleeve in an attempt to destabilise the younger man. Armstrong attacked Contador on a cross-wind stage early on, and then criticised him publicly for not following the team's gameplan in the Pyrenees. Afterwards, Contador said there had been "a tendency to prioritise other people's interests". In other words, Astana were racing for Armstrong even though Contador was the strongest.

It might have seemed astonishing that Contador was not destabilised, but in fact it is no surprise once his past was taken into account. In 2004, Contador crashed at the Tour of Asturias. It seemed an ordinary fall, but Contador noticed something: he had abrasions on the back of his hands, not the palms as would be expected. In other words, he had been unconscious when he fell. It was discovered that the fainting fit was linked to a cavernoma, an aneurism: he was offered the option of a risky operation to solve the problem, or remaining handicapped in the sense that he would not be allowed to ride his bike or drive.

The operation left him with 100 stitches running from ear to ear, but it left him with something else, according to those close to him: maturity. "He has said this escape has helped him recognise what is important in life: every time he looks in a mirror he can see the scar, which is as if a doctor had opened his head to look at his brain," says Jacinto Vidarte, the former journalist who handles press for Contador. "He looks older than his true age, because he matured quickly. It always surprises people:when they start talking to him, he seems far older and more experienced than they expect."

There are question marks over Contador's ability to notch up a third Tour win. One involves the strength of his team: Astana was left virtually riderless when Armstrong moved on with all his mates, and has been rebuilt with a core of strong Italians and Spaniards, including Pereiro. It has never looked poor this year, but whether it will come apart in the crucible of the Tour is another question. There are also doubts about Contador's capacity to get through one specific stage, the third, which includes several sections of the cobbles used in the Paris-Roubaix Classic. But if he is in with a shout when the Tour enters the Pyrenees in the final week, the Spanish stealth fighter will take some shooting down.

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